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How We Interact With the Unknown

Discovery discussions tend to be very technical and detail-oriented. I have been looking for ways to explain how the basic elements in my discovery proposals are based on simple concepts taken directly from how humans interact with the unknown. Our brain is nothing but a big pattern-matching machine, and machine discovery works in a very similar way.

The basic idea is that discovery is the combination of three concepts:

Discovery = Patterns + Interfaces + Descriptors

The following presentation explains these concepts as they apply to human interaction. The same concepts are found in XRD, LRDD, and pretty much any discovery protocol.

The full size video (which is easier to view) can be found here. Due to the amount of animation in this presentation and special fonts, I am not sharing the PowerPoint document at this point.

I usually use it as part of presentations I give, so it does lack an audio track or narrative. But I think if you ignore the technical implications and just take each slide as an individual message, it does have some insights to share. I hope to find the time to enhance it in the future, but I don’t have any such plans at this point.

Wow, that actually physically caused pain in my head …but there was such sweet, simplistic logic that I do believe I ‘get it’. Thank you for this fascinating insight into a something, I had never before encountered.

Great video, really liked the simple metaphor and use of imagery. This is very helpful for someone like myself that comes from a healthcare background trying to learn more about the way this “internets” thing works.

I think the implications of this go way beyond WebFinger and your other projects. I see some great applications here when building out everything from an enterprise app down to the smallest website UX.

Was that a typo I spotted in the last bit? “Broadcasted” is spelt correctly, but is not correct within this context.

It’s a real pity that more people don’t understand just how important fuzzy pattern recognition is to life – not just humans and not just visual pattern matching. Without it, we could not function – nor would we see religious icons in toasted sandwiches either.

Excellent work -but as others have said, it really needs audio because without that supporting context, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense: most of us don’t have the prior knowledge to understand the foundation you’re working from,